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By Shlomo Ben-Ami
Former Israeli overseas Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami used to be a key determine within the Camp David negotiations and lots of different rounds of peace talks, public and mystery, with Palestinian and Arab officers. right here he deals an unflinching account of the Arab-Israeli clash, proficient via his firsthand wisdom of the main characters and events.
Clear-eyed and unsparing, Ben-Ami strains the twists and turns of the center East clash and offers us behind-the-scenes money owed of the conferences in Oslo, Madrid, and Camp David. the writer paints really trenchant pix of key figures from Ben-Gurion to invoice Clinton. he's hugely serious of either Ariel Sharon and the overdue Yasser Arafat, seeing Arafat's rejection of Clinton's peace plan as against the law opposed to the Palestinian humans. the writer is usually severe of President Bush's center East coverage, which he calls "a presumptuous grand strategy." alongside the best way, Ben-Ami highlights the numerous error on each side, describing for example how the good victory of the Six Day warfare introduced many Israelis on a misbegotten "messianic" dream of controlling all of the Biblical Jewish lands, which simply served to make the Palestinian challenge a lot worse. by contrast, it has simply been while Israel has suffered setbacks that it has made strikes in the direction of peace. the simplest wish for the zone, he concludes, is to create a world mandate within the Palestinian territories that may bring about the implementation of Clinton's two-state peace parameters.
Scars of battle, Wounds of Peace is an enormous paintings of history--with by means of some distance the main reasonable and balanced critique of Israel ever to come back from one among its key officers. This paperback variation contains a new Epilogue by means of the writer that includes an research of the latest occasions within the Israeli-Arab state of affairs, from the disappearance of Ariel Sharon from public existence to the emergence of Hamas and Israel's contemporary warfare opposed to Hizballah. it's an absolute must-read for everybody who desires to comprehend the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli clash.
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Extra info for Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
Example text
The military way advocated by the younger generation was not just a matter of operational tactics. It was an entirely new political concept, whereby national aspirations could not be realised through traditional Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict Zionist diplomatic means or by way of political accommodation, but only through the use of military force. Convinced of the inevitability of an allout war between Jews and Arabs for the possession of Palestine, the impatient young military leaders now wanted to extricate the movement for Jewish national liberation from the old evolutionary methods of the founding fathers.
The latter refused to endorse Jabotinsky’s emphasis on Scars of War, Wounds of Peace the integrity of Eretz-Israel that should include, according to him, both banks of the River Jordan. They also rejected his call for a public acknowledgement by the Zionist movement that full-fledged Jewish statehood and political sovereignty over the whole of Eretz-Israel was the unquestionable objective of the Zionist movement. The issues at stake were so central to the political identity of the two parties that, once his proposals were defeated by the Labourite majority, Jabotinsky decided in to lead the Revisionists out of the Zionist organization altogether.
The social services, the economic infrastructure, the educational system and the geographical boundaries of the Arab and Jewish communities were clearly defined. This was never the case, however, of an imposed South Africa style segregation by either side. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs were especially keen on having a mixed society in Palestine. A central ethos of the early Zionist enterprise, the principle of ‘Jewish labour’, was also instrumental in limiting the interaction between the two societies.